


Tuesday gardens

by Kit



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Cottage Au, F/F, Fluff, Tuesdays are the best days, canon grief followed by AU fluff, i am not even joking, love letters through fic, without these two girls I'd be single
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 14:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16120727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit/pseuds/Kit
Summary: Two would-be wardens fall in love with each other before Duncan can get to either of them. The end of the world can wait.





	1. Girls and glass voices

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lemonsharks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/gifts).



> The first chapter is the one time I attempted to be canon compliant with these two before @lemonsharks and I decided, 'Fuck it, let them be happy'. But it works as an introductory piece for both of them right up until everything at Kinloch Hold goes boom.

**Girls and glass voices**

An enchanter from Gwaren looks after Kinloch’s babies. His influence shows in a fondness for werewolf stories, and half a dozen children whose voices are all in different stages of stretch and lilt. They are salt pool voices. Gull and gannet voices, scattered all about the hold.

Cecily Amell has a glass voice. Smooth to its sharp edges and clear all through. She shapes words like she’ll cut them and it does something to the ends.

New apprentices mean scorch marks and words thick with shock or sobs. They mean changes to the Templar guard, and Irving sweeping someone raw and new up into the floors with proper libraries and good carpeting, just so he can say his words about  _graveness_  and  _goodness_ , Greagoir’s shadow stretched long over his big desk as he stands at the First Enchanter’s shoulder.

Dolours was three, when she came to the hold. She’s picked up Irving’s usual speech through echoes and shouts. Some apprentices lash out in the dormitories. Magic or fists or words.

Dolours knows to be careful.

They all do.

Amell keeps most of her words behind her teeth, and ice crystals stretch across the windows. She does not lash out. Does not cry.

Dolours, barely bigger than the chairs she pushes against the inside of dormitory doors each night, does not know if she is disgusted or impressed. She watches her read books meant for the older apprentices, and wishes she could trust her own handwriting enough to leave notes in the margins. “Stress  _here_ , not there,” she might write. Or: “How do you do that trick with the ice?”

 

 

***

_Swot. Marcher. Knife-ear._

Small slights and shoves. Spells to make the porridge burn at the bottom of their bowls. Words thrown at both their backs as senior enchanters remember their childhood fears and talk over the top of it all.  _If we survived_ , their shadows say,  _then you’ll just have to buck up_.

Dolours wishes she didn’t blush. It sounds sweet in books and feels horrible in her skin, anger looking too much like shame as her ears burn and her palms turn slick in her lap.

_Irving’s girls._

Dolours wishes she could spit.

“Is that the best you can do?”

Amell is all raised chin and scorn, voice bright and sharp as she shakes red-gold hair out of her face and  _glares_. Even the senior enchanter takes a step backward, before he remembers to scold.

“I like the way you talk,” Dolours says. She hopes she is not too young for notice. Hopes that the surprise on the other girl’s face won’t shift into something sneering. “You should do it more. I’m Dolours, by the way.”

More than  _Surana,_ the part of herself that isn’t tower grown.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

***

“A tree?”

Cecily blinks. “I…was not expecting that.”

Dolours is almost fourteen and trying not to grin, ink smeared up her left arm to the elbow. Cecily is bent over her translation notes and if Dolours looks too happy then she’ll ruin it, joy leaking out until the librarian can  _see_  that there’s more fun than study in this small, shared space.

 _I think ridiculous things._ Thoughts don’t have colours or sound. She knows her head is a tangle of associations and that making her friend laugh should not taste like something sparkling. Sparkles don’t even  _have_ taste.

“It’s a  _silly_  story,” Dolours says. “I don’t know why Helvin goes on about the death spells and blood magic and snakes and all that in Tevinter when their classics are about fart jokes and sex.”

“Or no sex, in this case.”

“If I had to deal with that prince, I’d turn into a tree, too.”

Cecily’s smile broadens, and Dolours does not blush. “I see your point,” she says. “ _And_ where you get your jokes from.”

She reads aloud, mangling every soft consonant of the Tevene while Dolours tries hide her laughter behind her hands.

 

***

There are nights when she’s sure she can feel everyone’s breathing in her own throat, rasping and dragging all up inside until she’s staring at the ceiling and sure that her heart is too fast, that the sick feeling in her stomach is acid leaking out. She imagines she can hear Anders—though she knows that is just her mind filling the screams she hasn’t voiced. She wishes she was too small to notice or old enough to help.

Dolours learns to pace. She tries for quiet, but a few always wake, groaning and whispering for her to shut up, their voices still carefully pitched not to leak out through doors without locks.

Most sleep through it.

***

Entropy spells are dramatic, especially when they break.

Jowan is more upset about Dolours’s hair than she is. He keeps looking at hanks of it on the floor of the classroom. It does seem like there’s more of it there than there ever was on her  _head_ , sitting in sad, mousy drifts.

She is definitely upset about the smell. Singed and animal, her scalp stinging and her eyes watering.

“Well,” she says. “I don’t think I got that quite right, somehow.”

She’s mostly glad that Cecily—after years of Dolours reshaping spell-words for her—is not laughing too hard.

“It suits you,” she says. “I’m not just saying that.”

Dolours runs a hand over her scalp, ignoring the enchanters now crowding the door and demanding explanations. “I could like this, I think.”

Cecily grins. “Help me with something?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You heard me.” Dangerous vowels. “C’mon, Jowan. You, too.”

They follow her through corridors, meeting each other’s eyes in Cecily’s wake. Dolours wonders if she looks as awed as Jowan does, and finds she does not mind.

***

They are crowded around Cecily’s mirror, and Dolours watches as Jowan helps their friend take a razor to a lifetime’s worth of growth. Dolours isn’t sure what surprises her more: the act, the razor, or the line of her cheek as the weight of her hair falls away.

“You don’t have to  _do_ this.”

“Of course not,” Cecily says, and they both wince as Jowan’s hand slips at a spot in the back she can’t reach. “I wanted to.”

Dolours catches her own stunned expression in the mirror and turns to scowl at Jowan for another slip.

***

Emer is gone. Finn among the Tranquil, soon to be shipped off to Ostwick. Talia, still growing and younger than Cecily, is all gangling haughtiness in enchanter’s robes, but Dolours notices blue black smudges beneath her eyes, and Irving has not assigned her a class to teach.

She leaves powder at Talia’s door. She always makes extra, and it’s not a hard trick to learn.

They move drift deep in rumours, and the slip of a year between them feels like it could crack into something impossible to cross. Dolours has leaned to hide her blushes and panic under face paint. She watches Jowan as he grows shuttered and sneaky; tries to spot patterns in the way the enchanters look at their students and who comes back after a Harrowing.

She finds a patch of tower garden grown brown and overwhelmed in a too-long summer and enlists Cecily to transplant stolen snatches of clary sage and thyme. She wishes there was room for lavender in amongst the embrium. There’d be a stunning colour play.

Rumours drift. Dolours keeps her hands in the dirt.

 

***

Ice melts faster than she can form it. Dolours scowls as glass steams.

“This is harder than I thought.”

Cecily smirks. “Good. So few things are.”

“Oi.

“I shall  _keep_  this victory, thank you,” says Cecily, leaning in to watch her work. She’s careful not to touch, but Dolours can feel a tightening in the empty space between their bodies. Shivers as she feels warm breath on her bare scalp.

 _Wanting_ touch is slippery and strange.

 _You’re allowed_ , she wishes she could say.  _Out of anyone here, you’re allowed_.

_Am I?_

When she masters the spell, Dolours weaves rough crystals through Cecily’s hair until it grows heavy and water-dark.

***

“May I kiss you?”

Cecily Amell has a glass voice. Smooth to its sharp edges and clear all through, even when she’s looking at her own hands and the garden. She’s had concerns about aphids. There has never been a spell.

Irving has not spoken to either of them for a week. The world is narrowing and there is mud on her robes. The sun is too high for this. The back of her neck will burn.

_Hush. Stop babbling._

She nods.

 _“_ Something is going to happen, today,” she says, which is not a silly love declaration or a wept bit of thanks that Cecily  _asked_ , today or any day, but just as true. “Tomorrow, maybe. Tuesday at the outside.”

Cecily’s lips echo hers. Dolours lets her eyes close.

Pressure and warmth and a hand on her arm, a small gasp of laughter as Cecily remembers how to breathe.

***

She is harrowed the next day, lyrium thick in her mouth, leaving her voiceless and kiss-less while Greagoir’s quiet death in her ear. Cecily, she thinks, will stand straighter when it is her turn. She will know what to say.

***

She follows Jowan in his flight and is half amazed her foot doesn’t fall through the floor. He pulls at her—urgent, babbling, the silences of the last year filled now with  _Lily_ and  _phylacteries,_ along with a dread that Dolours wishes she’d seen.

“We should find Cecily,” she says.

“Amell’s in the chamber,” he tells her. “Went while you slept. There’s no  _time_.”

Kinloch Hold is tiny and endless, and Dolours wonders what shape her friend’s fears shall take.

***

Jowan breaks and Dolours is cut.

***

It takes a long time before Dolours Surana stops writing letters in her head.

_You’d think after the Harrowing I’d be leerier about taking strange liquids from big, ominous bowls._

_This boy is too silly to be charming, but I’m charmed. I don’t think I’ve met anyone so earnest. If he was in one of the Tilani quest poems he’d be the lost king._

_There’s a woman who looks too much like you. I think she’s flirting with me. I don’t think that’s me wishing things, love. If I was imagining you flirting than you wouldn’t be making comments about how I wear my_ hair _. Honestly._

_Are you teaching students? Are you safe? I saw Wynne at Ostegar. Did she tell you? I hope she did._

_Unless she said that everyone died. That would be—well. All this magic—all this_ stuff _that people fear, and I can’t even work out how to send a message._

_I think I saw old Uldred, too. Just for a second. My lost king put him in a mood._

_I’m learning so many new things. Maps are so much more beautiful when they show true places, and I’ve coaxed Morrigan into lessons. She’s had no tower to say that her bones cannot hold another shape. Perhaps I’ll fly back and find you._

_I know. Too much the gallant rescue. But don’t look at me like you wouldn’t that favour._

_Seems fair that it’s my turn, after all these years._

_~~Cecily. Cecily, I—~~ _

_~~I’ve never understood staying, before. I was going to die in Kinloch and it terrified me.~~ _

_~~But I’ve killed too many today. Killed with others at my back and orders in my mouth and I don’t know if I can do this. My dreams were bad enough without archdemons in them, and that ugly bugger isn’t even the worst of it, now.~~ _

_~~Today, I’d go back if I could.~~ _

_I’m nearly back. The Wardens need Irving. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to do this. But I’m a month a week two days away and I hope you’ll…well. I just hope._

***

The Tower is a ruin. It is tiny and it is endless, bodies strewn in unlikely heaps. Wynne’s barrier magic strains over children Dolours had last seen learning their sums and Alistair tells her to calm down as she opens every door.

“This  _is_ calm,” she snaps. “Compared to screaming.”

Uldred is dead. Irving nearly so. She does her duty with a stone stuck in her throat. Waits until promises are made until she comes apart, Morrigan blocking her body from sight as she uses anger and hope and the Fade still clinging to her skin.

Dolours splits and spreads, new-won magic shimmering and leaving her scattered, a swarm of insects that knows every hidden door in the stone. She is mindless and many as she searches, wings screaming for her until she’s left exhausted at Morrigan’s feet.

The witch helps her her up with pitiless hands, though her eyes are not quite unkind.

“Well?” she asks. “Did you find her or not? We should not linger here.”

Warden Surana cannot speak.

 


	2. thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> late night comfort fluff

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This little archive project was a better idea for I realised that lemonsharks was a much more prolific writer of the pair. For more cuteness (and writing that made me fall in love with its author years ago and still makes me melt now), go [here]()

By the time Dolours is 30 can think of the house as theirs. Leaning and patched and with wisteria making an eye-stinging, gaudy and glorious mess of the east wall. (She loves the leaf shadows on their faces. The vine is body-strong, gnarled and used them by now. Petals catch in Cecily’s hair, pale against snarled red and gold.  Dolours adds washed violet to the ink up her arm.

“Sap.”

“And?”

Lips on hers, and work-roughened fingers tracing the smile that snuck in with the kiss. “And it’s Tuesday.”

Ten years of shared space and locks that don’t need changing.

(She changes them every year. They both add spells to the metalwork.)

Her books come up against the bed in drifts.  Students, when they have them, come to her with blood and nightmares and upset stomachs. She does not know her own voice when she talks to them, only that it soothes more than she expects.

Cecily is better with cake and common sense.

(”If you get this trick, boy,” she says, brisk and clear, “then I promise that you can turn into a bird and chase that noisemaker away.”

“Will it work?”

“For five minutes. Maybe ten.”

“We’ll take it,” Dolours mutters, while this newest Marcher child grits his teeth and Cecily makes shushing motions over his head.”)  

Sometimes, she wakes up before the bird. Skin too tight, heart too fast. They’ll run out of food. The warding’s weak. She was never any good at wards, and someone’s stray fire spell is going to _—Jowan, move the desk. Up against the door. That’s right. Where’s Finn?_

Her own voice in her ears. Years old and small, like the few stories Cecily tells about her months waiting at the Gallows before Kinloch Hold had room for one more mage.

She’s tangled in sheets, and has no idea what will come out if she opens her mouth. Screamed-Silence mixed in with: “Good morning, I thought this was meant to  _go away_ , my apologies.” Laughter. Sobs. Nothing.

Just the feeling of stuck-down and all the air in her trapped up in her throat.

The bed creaks. She should apologise. The bird will be making noise any minute. There’s weeding today—always weeding, any day—and she knows the dark circles under Cecily’s eyes better than her own—are her eyes going, up close? They might. Years, after all. It’s been years, and she should—

Cecily moves to the door and the checks the lock.

She’s tangled in sheets, but she can stand, stumbling over books as soon as her feet hit the floor.

“We’ll fix that,” Cecily says, absent.

“What?”

“The books. Eventually. I could manage carpentry.”

“I—”

“—Tea?”

“I love you.”

They open the door together.

“Any day can be Tuesday,” Cecily says, ducking her head to kiss Dolour’s cheek. “And some days are just… spiked. I love you, too.” 


	3. shyness

They have a teapot. Solid and squat and too ugly for its bright blue glaze, and Dolours does not know where they  _found_ the thing.Well. Where Cecily found it. She’s had a knack for drawing usefulness of objects. 

Dolours had tea in her things, at least. A guilty indulgence tucked into the sleeve of her robes, then into new pockets and bags as they discarded those scorch-stained bits of Kinloch hold somewhere between Kirkwall and Wycome. 

Sometimes she still picks at non-existent hems. Her arms are light. Bare as her scalp. Too much empty skin. 

And now Cecily is pouring  _her_ tea–theirs–from a teapot Dolours has never seen. The cups are chipped. She knows those, at least. Mismatched white and brown things, sitting by in a cupboard, faint magic from an old owner’s hands still mixed in with the dust.

“Cecily,” she says. The words are close. They ripple the tea. “We’re not going to die.” 

Cecily blinks. She’s still bent forward, wrist angled to pour. The cup is overflowing before Dolours reaches out, flinching at the her wrist right up to the elbow– _robes_ , remember that you don’t wear  _robes_  any more–and rights it. They have wet hands and flushed faces, and there is a frown between Cecily’s eyebrows. 

“No,” she says. “We’re really not, are we? How–” 

“–bloody hell,” says Dolours.  

 _“_ Quite.”

Dolours swallows. She stands, tugging the teapot away and letting it sit in a dry spot on the table. It looks, she thinks, rather forlorn. Cecily’s mouth moves. A rueful, sweet shift in expression that Dolours does not quite remember ever  _first_  noticing, only that once she did, it kept her up at night. 

Now, she reaches down and brushes a kiss there, and she’d be embarrassed over how nervous her fingers are, gentle over Cecily’s cheekbone, up into her hair, if she couldn’t feel Cecily’s lips tremble. The catch in her breath.

She has almost count of kisses. Not quite. There is too much wonder and too many weeks where they’ve been too tired to do anything but move or sleep. But there have an unfair few, for all that. All perfect.

They are not going to die.  


End file.
